The Myth of the Eternal Return

The Myth of the Eternal Return PDF

Author: Mircea Eliade

Publisher: Bollingen

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 9780691017778

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This essay on humanity's experience of history and its interpretation begins with a study of the traditional or mythological view and concludes with a comparative estimate of modern historiological approaches.

The Sacred and the Profane

The Sacred and the Profane PDF

Author: Mircea Eliade

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1959

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780156792011

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Famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also emcompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence. -- P. [4] of cover.

The Myth of the Eternal Return

The Myth of the Eternal Return PDF

Author: Mircea Eliade

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0691238324

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First published in English in 1954, this founding work of the history of religions secured the North American reputation of the Romanian émigré-scholar Mircea Eliade. Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no fewer than half a dozen European languages, The Myth of the Eternal Return illuminates the religious beliefs and rituals of a wide variety of archaic religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to their practices is impossible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding their views to enrich the contemporary imagination of what it is to be human. This book includes an introduction from Jonathan Z. Smith that provides essential context and encourages readers to engage in an informed way with this classic text.

Hiking with Nietzsche

Hiking with Nietzsche PDF

Author: John Kaag

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0374715742

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"A stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection." --Heller McAlpin, NPR.org Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. One of Lit Hub's 15 Books You Should Read in September and one of Outside's Best Books of Fall A revelatory Alpine journey in the spirit of the great Romantic thinker Friedrich Nietzsche Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys—one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag’s journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition. Just as Kaag’s acclaimed debut, American Philosophy: A Love Story, seamlessly wove together his philosophical discoveries with his search for meaning, Hiking with Nietzsche is a fascinating exploration not only of Nietzsche’s ideals but of how his experience of living relates to us as individuals in the twenty-first century. Bold, intimate, and rich with insight, Hiking with Nietzsche is about defeating complacency, balancing sanity and madness, and coming to grips with the unobtainable. As Kaag hikes, alone or with his family, but always with Nietzsche, he recognizes that even slipping can be instructive. It is in the process of climbing, and through the inevitable missteps, that one has the chance, in Nietzsche’s words, to “become who you are."

Imagining Religion

Imagining Religion PDF

Author: Jonathan Z. Smith

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 0226763609

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With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review

Nietzsche and the Eternal Return

Nietzsche and the Eternal Return PDF

Author: Miguel Serrano

Publisher:

Published: 2020-11-09

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13: 9781716437854

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"The Eternal Return has certainly not been thought by philosophers or by those who are concerned about Nietzsche in the contemporary history of ideas, and this because the Eternal Return can not be thought of. It is a revelation that presents next to the Silvaplana rock, or on the threshold of the Gateway of the Moment, where the Two Ways meet."

Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis

Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis PDF

Author: Daniel Chapelle

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780791415276

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This book presents a reading of the Nietzschean thought of the eternal return of all things and relates it to Freud's psychoanalysis of the repetition compulsion. Nietzsche's eternal return and Freud's repetition compulsion have never before been so seriously compared. The manner in which this study is executed is drastically different from usual Nietzsche scholarship and Freud studies. Chapelle works with his material until it acquires archetypal levels of significance, even while the level of everyday life experience is never abandoned. He returns the theory and practice of psychologizing and philosophizing to the old ground of imaginative poetic and ultimately mythic thought.

Yoga

Yoga PDF

Author: Mircea Eliade

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1958

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 9780691017648

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In this landmark book the renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga, exploring how its guiding principle, that of freedom, involves remaining in the world without letting oneself be exhausted by such "conditionings" as time and history. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a comprehensive survey of Yoga in theory and practice from its earliest foreshadowings in the Vedas through the twentieth century. The subjects discussed include Patañjali, author of the Yoga-sutras; yogic techniques, such as concentration "on a Single Point," postures, and respiratory discipline; and Yoga in relation to Brahmanism, Buddhism, Tantrism, Oriental alchemy, mystical erotism, and shamanism.